About Heroes

This Review was submitted by Dennis Feeback

By Jim Shooter, David Lapham, and Bob Hall

The Scoop: This 192-page deluxe hardcover edition collects the full Harbinger origin story from Harbinger issues 0-7 digitally recolored and remastered, and also features an all-new "Origin of Harada" story written by comics legend JIM SHOOTER and illustrated by BOB HALL (Shadowman). This "Origin of Harada" story includes its own original cover and features the first appearance of a new character in the Valiant Universe! Valiant's goal is to make this deluxe hardcover edition something special for Valiant fans and a great introduction to the Harbinger saga for new Valiant fans. The book retails for $24.95.

The Package: The book has a really nice dust jacket featuring artwork of the main character and the main villain. Back cover has a description of the contents. The books cover is black with the Harbinger logo embossed on the front with the new Valiant logo on the back.

The book its self is pretty nice, it contains Harbinger #’s 0-7 completely recolored with the newest technology. This is the part I was most worried about before seeing the book, as I thought the colors on the original books were just fine and really unique for the time. However, I had nothing to worry about. It is recolored with more detail added; it is VERY faithful to what came before.

Now what didn’t I like? Not much. The only problem I had with the book at all was some of the pages were awfully rough. It felt like they didn’t have good materials to scan from. Issue 5 seemed to be the worst example of this. For a book that’s only about 15 years old, this just seems like the book was rushed. But really, this is just me nit picking.

Final Thoughts: I don’t think there was a bigger Valiant fan back in the 90’s than me. I loved and lived this stuff. I even went crazy and bought all the variants and gold covers. I was all about Valiant until Jim Shooter was canned.

Harbinger was one of my faves at the time, so it was nice to revisit the book again. It would be really nice to see more of these collections but due to the legal wrangling between two factions of Valiant this may never happen. This collection contains story lines that pretty much kick off the entire valiant cross continuity, so hopefully this can be followed up on.

As for the new 8 pager? Well, it was pretty good. In some ways it was like Big Jim Shooter never left. It certainly felt like a classic Valiant story. Jim slipped right back into writing Harada. But will this new character ever be seen again? Will Big Jim return for new Valiant comics? The answers to all these questions are unknown.

Final Rating: B. One letter grade was removed for the poorly scanned pages from the later issues.